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On Friday, Donald Trump signed an executive order halting admission of refugees for 120 days and halting travel from seven majority-Muslim countries — Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and Somalia — for 90 days while the federal government undertakes a review of admission procedures. He has also imposed an annual cap of 50,000 refugees. The instant backlash, which has culminated in thousands of protesters creating chaos at the nation’s airports, is the result more of knee-jerk emotion than a sober assessment of Trump’s policy.

It’s a well-documented fact that would-be terrorists are posing as refugees to obtain admission into Europe, and visa screenings have routinely failed to identify foreign nationals who later committed terrorist attacks in the United States. As the Islamic State continues its reign of terror across a large swath of the Middle East, it should be a matter of common sense that the U.S. needs to evaluate and strengthen its vetting.

Trump’s executive order is an attempt — albeit, an ill-conceived attempt in several ways, about which more momentarily — to address this problem. Rhetoric about “open arms” aside, the United States. has been modest in its approach to refugees for the past two decades. During the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. regularly admitted fewer than 50,000 refugees. Barack Obama’s tenure was little different — he increased the refugee cap to 70,000 at the beginning of his second term but normally admitted numbers on par with Bush’s — until he dramatically expanded the cap (to 110,000) for 2017. Trump’s order is, to this extent, a return to recent norms.

Similar myths have dominated the public understanding of the Syrian-refugee program. Until ratcheting up the program in 2016, the Obama administration admitted fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees between 2011 and 2015 — this at the time that the former president was dithering over his “red line.” The 13,000 Syrian refugees admitted during 2016, pursuant to President Obama’s expansion, still constitute an infinitesimal fraction of the refugee population, which is in the several millions, of that war-torn country. Trump has suspended that program temporarily, pending review.

When that program comes back on-line, it will include a directive to prioritize Christians, Yazidis, and other persecuted religious minorities — against which the Obama administration effectively discriminated at the same time that it was declaring Christians to be victims of “genocide” at the hands of ISIS. Given the unique threats these groups face, moving them to the front of the line should be an obvious measure, and contrary to outraged claims otherwise, prioritizing religious minorities is in accordance with law; religion is already used as a criterion for evaluating refugee-status claims.

Finally, there is recent precedent for Trump’s order. In 2011, the Obama administration halted refugee-processing from Iraq for six months in order to do exactly what the Trump administration is doing now: ensure that terrorists were not exploiting the program to enter the country. No one rushed to JFK International to protest. Also, the seven countries to which the order applies are taken from Obama-era precedents.

A day after President Trump’s executive order suspending immigration from terrorism-producing countries was signed, an Obama-appointed judge on Saturday night followed the advice of George Soros-funded groups seeking to blunt it.

It is yet another searing reminder that the Left doesn’t believe in American democracy. To the Left, elections only have consequences when their side wins. And when they lose, mobocracy, intimidation, and street violence take over. The chant “this is what democracy looks like” is the hallmark of left-wing authoritarianism.

These leftist temper tantrums are becoming a regular thing in the week-and-a-half-old Trump era. When President Trump honors a campaign promise he made to the American people, on cue the Left explodes in a fireball of anger and hatred, much of it underwritten by radical billionaire George Soros.

The Hungarian-born billionaire two dozen times over is a radical open-borders advocate committed to dissolving national boundaries. He has said Communist China’s system of government is superior to our own and that the United States is the number one obstacle to world peace. In the U.S. he has financed the violent, politically destabilizing Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements. He also funds many of the groups that participated in the various anti-Trump women’s marches across America on Jan. 21.

Before the narrowly drawn restraining order was issued Saturday evening, near-riots broke out as leftist freak shows descended on airports across America. Demonstrators were horrified that some individuals were actually being detained at ports-of-entry as required by the president’s 100 percent legal and constitutional executive order. The left-wing hissy-fit consisted of radicals trespassing and endangering airport security by staging disruptive in-your-face protests at airports around the country.

Those who hate America have increasingly been expressing themselves politically at the nation’s airports. On Jan. 6 suspected jihadist Esteban Santiago gunned down innocent people at the baggage check at Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

One should not be surprised at the Media-Democrat complex’s attempt to manufacture a scandal over a draft executive order on the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants that the Trump White House refuses to avow. After all, nothing united the Left and fueled the Democratic political ascendancy of 2005 through 2009 like the anti-torture crusade. It had all the necessary elements of a successful campaign: outsized progressive indignation, the collusion of influential Republicans (especially John McCain, whose personal history imbued him with a moral authority that deflected the incoherence of his contentions), and an enfeebled Republican administration too exhausted and too worried about the press to defend itself effectively.

Factor in some of now-President Trump’s most outrageous statements on the campaign trail — such as suggesting that he would have the families of terrorists killed and would employ interrogation techniques harsher than waterboarding — and it became a ripe dead certainty that the Left would mobilize at the first hint of policy deliberations over the handling of captured terrorists.

For now, however, it is much ado about nothing.

At most, what we’re seeing is another iteration of a problem I alluded to Wednesday in addressing President Obama’s negotiations over the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership: the need for confidential deliberations versus the determination of the press (and of Democrats during any GOP administration) that there shall be no secrets.

The Trump administration has not yet announced a policy on the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. Critics should hold their fire until that happens. The draft executive order is just that, a draft — even if we assume, based on reported indications from unidentified administration leakers, that it is part of the discussion in Trump’s national-security team.

It is not just a commonplace — it is an inevitability that major policy decisions and the memoranda that memorialize them go through numerous iterations before they are finalized. The Left’s tired playbook depicts all Republican presidents as imbeciles and their advisers as amateur hour. Thus, much is being made of the fact that the draft executive order gets the date of the 9/11 attacks wrong, placing them a decade after the fact, on September 11, 2011. Put aside that this mistake is clearly a typo. (I’ve done it myself a number of times; plus, the date of the 9/11 attacks is rendered correctly on page 2 of the document.) The error also occurs in the very first paragraph (near the beginning, on the fifth line). To a sensible, objective analyst, that would suggest that wherever this draft comes from, it must be a document produced very early in the deliberation process. It must not have been perused by too many people before the New York Times “obtained” it.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/01/26/miami-complies-with-president-trumps-executive-order-cracking-d/21701318/ President Trump is making it much riskier to be an undocumented immigrant in Miami. Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez said the county will comply with Trump’s executive order forcing all so-called “sanctuary cities” to turn over undocumented immigrants who are arrested. Sanctuary cities or counties are areas where local officials decline federal requests to […]

President Donald Trump is doing something incredibly rare for a politician in Washington, D.C. He is keeping his word. Two of the most important of his campaign promises were to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into this country and to suspend the admission of “refugees” from countries prone to terrorism until a system of “extreme vetting” is put into place. On Tuesday night, President Trump tweeted out a teaser: “Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!”

After eight long years of Obama administration policies that endangered the security of the American people, President Trump is placing Americans first — before illegal aliens and self-declared “refugees” from terrorist prone countries.

The president began fulfilling his promises on immigration by signing two executive orders on Wednesday at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whose responsibilities include overseeing immigration and border security. Mr. Trump also took part in a ceremony installing his new Secretary of Homeland Security, retired Marine General John Kelly. In his remarks following the signing, President Trump emphasized that DHS is a “law enforcement agency.” He added that “beginning today, the United States gets back control of its borders.”

The first executive order he signed redirected funds already appropriated by Congress towards paying for the construction of the border wall he has promised between Mexico and the United States. Additional funding appropriations will be required from Congress for completion of the project. However, President Trump still intends that Mexico will ultimately reimburse U.S. taxpayers for the expenditures through one means or another, including possibly redirecting monies presently slotted for foreign aid to Mexico or using revenue from border taxes. President Trump’s action came on the same day that Mexico’s foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, was due to arrive in Washington to help prepare for the visit of Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto later this month.

The order would end the “catch-and-release” policies the Obama administration utilized, under which illegals awaiting removal hearings were released. More detention facilities along the border are planned for construction. According to Immigration and Custom Enforcement figures cited by Fox News, 179,040 of the 925,193 illegal immigrants who have evaded a scheduled deportation had criminal convictions.

The Trump administration is anticipating roadblocks put in its way by legal challenges, including activists’ exploitation of environmental laws to block construction of the wall. However, the administration should be able to prevail and move forward expeditiously. The REAL ID Act of 2005 gives the Secretary of Homeland Security “the authority to waive all legal requirements such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads” along U.S. borders. Federal district courts have exclusive jurisdiction to hear challenges to the Secretary of Homeland Security’s determination, but a “cause of action or claim may only be brought alleging a violation of the Constitution of the United States.” Melinda Taylor, an environmental law professor with the University of Texas, said, “The new administration has a wild card they can pull and it’s in this law. The language in this law allows them to waive all federal laws that would be an impediment to building any type of physical barrier along the border, including a wall.” Actually, “the authority to waive all legal requirements” in the statute would extend to state and local laws and regulations, as well as federal laws. The president’s constitutional authority derives from his fundamental constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” – in this case, the nation’s existing immigration laws.

President Trump signed a second executive order addressing the so-called “sanctuary cities,” which have been openly defying federal immigration law enforcement. They may face the loss of certain federal funding if they continue their 21st century version of segregationist Governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door” in opposition to federally mandated school desegregation.

In September, Donald Trump laid out a ten-point plan for immigration, emphasizing border security, the enforcement of immigration laws, and the removal of criminal aliens. The president’s latest executive orders — one directing the construction of a wall on the U.S.–Mexico border, the other stripping federal grant money from sanctuary cities — are a first step toward making good on those promises.

On Wednesday, the president ordered Executive Branch agencies “to deploy all lawful means to secure the Nation’s southern border,” which includes the “construction of a physical wall on the southern border.” The rough terrain along parts of the U.S.–Mexico border likely militates against the “big, beautiful wall” that Trump envisions, but erecting physical barriers along further stretches of the 2,000 miles dividing the U.S. from its southern neighbor is an obvious and long-neglected tool to help clamp down on America’s ongoing illegal-immigration problem.

The second order, focusing on “enhancing public safety in the interior of the United States,” directs the attorney general and secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to deny federal grants to jurisdictions that refuse to comply with federal immigration law, insofar as they can do so within their legal authority.

These orders are a good start toward reorienting American immigration policy so that it favors the interests of American citizens over their foreign counterparts. However, they are only a start.

While the construction of a wall, and the potential deployment of technology such as below-ground sensors at the border, will be a helpful impediment to would-be lawbreakers, the crucial work will continue to be done by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies, which are woefully understaffed. Trump’s executive orders suggest bolstering these organizations with 10,000 and 5,000 new hires, respectively, and Trump has also announced the end of the catch-and-release policy that characterized the Obama administration’s approach to border security. Congress should work with him to secure both of those plans.